Jacques Cousteau Stars in an Undersea Music Video

By Kasia Cieplak-Mayr von Baldegg

In his 87 years, Jacques Cousteau worked as an explorer, naval officer, conservationist, scientist, author, and filmmaker. He shot dozens of films about the Earth's oceans and their dazzling wildlife, and as it turns out, the footage makes for an awesome music video too.

Digging through the edit bins at Emerson College, Caitlin and Josh Drake rescued scraps of Cousteau films and transformed them into this video for "The Ceiling" by the New York-based group Yellowbirds. The Drakes added hand-painted effects and analog animation before blending everything together digitally. The result is a surreal underwater adventure that echoes The Life Aquatic or even the hand-colored restoration of Méliès's 1902 sci-fi film, Voyage dans la lune. Be sure to watch it full screen and turn up the volume.

Yellowbirds is Sam Cohen, Brian Kantor, Annie Nero, and Josh Kaufman. Get their second album, Songs from the Vanished Frontier, including "The Ceiling," here.